


Pretty Things

by Innwich



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Merpeople, Happy halloween, Horror, M/M, Merperson Castiel, Mutilation, Non-Consensual Body Modification
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-27
Updated: 2014-10-27
Packaged: 2018-02-22 19:50:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,778
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2519717
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Innwich/pseuds/Innwich
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Castiel was a merman. He only knew too well why people shouldn’t pick up pretty things on the beach. Looks could be deceiving.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pretty Things

It was midnight when Castiel swam towards the beach.

The beach was always quiet after dark. The beaches were always quiet at night. Local children were told by their mothers to stay away from the waters, but the tourists didn’t know any better. Perhaps some drunken humans would stumble onto his hunting grounds later in the night.

Now, though, it was still too early for humans to be drunk, and too late for swimmers to stay. Even the shops by the beach were closed now.

There were a few shops next to the beach. They sold brightly colored toys that floated on the sea, and skin-tight clothing that humans wore for swimming. Castiel knew because he’d gone beyond the edge of the beach before. During a strong storm that had kept humans at home behind boarded windows, Castiel had crawled up the sand and onto a smooth man-made road, dragging himself inland with nothing but his hands.

As Castiel got closer to the shore, he spotted a human lying on the beach.

The human’s clothing looked familiar.

It was the man that Castiel had been watching for the last few day. What made him stand out from the milling crowds of humans was that he was always fully clothed. He came down to the beach in the late afternoons and stayed till nights, long after the other humans were gone, as if looking for something on the beach. He drove a metallic thing that let out a loud distinctive loud roar, so that Castiel could always hear it when the man came to the beach.

The man had hair that shone like fine sand under the sun. Castiel was a creature of the night. He only came out of the waters when the moon was high in the sky and the mist was thick, but he gladly stayed up in the mornings to watch the man.

The man was lying face down on a wet patch of sand, his pants getting soaked as the waves rushed up and down the sea. He wasn’t moving at all.

Castiel crawled up the beach, his tail trailing sluggishly behind him, his hands sinking into the wet sand. He ignored the man’s strange lower limbs, and kept crawling until he was high enough to lean over the man.

This was the first time that Castiel saw him up close.

Castiel sniffed at the man’s neck. The man didn’t smell like the drunken humans that Castiel usually lured into the sea. Castiel bunched his hand in the coat that the man wore, wondering about how humans could stand having the strange material covering their skins, before flipping the man over onto his back.

The man was beautiful.

The man’s eyes were closed, long eyelashes fanned on his high cheekbones. He was breathing shallowly with his soft mouth.

With those looks, he could pass for a merman.

Castiel couldn’t help running a hand through the man’s hair, feeling how different it felt different from his. Castiel’s hair was always wet, and salt would be left in his hair if he let it dry under the sun. The man’s hair was slightly oily and it was stiff with something that humans used on their hair.

Castiel frowned.

The man’s hair and clothes were too dry. He wasn’t washed up from the shore.

He’d only laid here after the tide had gone down.

“Got you, you son of a bitch.” The man lunged up, grabbing Castiel by the back of his neck. Startled, Castiel tried to get away from the man, thrashing his tail, which only succeeded in kicking up sand that rained down on him and the man.

The weight at the back of his neck was getting heavier. The man was trying to press Castiel’s face down into the sand. Castiel strained his neck to not buckle under the man’s weight.

The man moved faster than Castiel could react. He kicked at Castiel’s arms. Castiel fell onto his side in the sand.

Castiel growled, and kicked at the man with his tail, trying to hit him with a hard smack that could knock out a shark.

The man dodged his tail. Everything was heavy and inflexible and slow on land. Castiel nearly dislocated a bone in his tail in that attack. Before Castiel could kick at the man again, the man straddled his tail, pressing three sharps tips against his chest.

Castiel stilled, staring at the weapon.

It was a trident. One of the few things that could kill a merman.

The man backhanded him across his cheek. It stung. “I know you can talk, fish. So talk.”

“Who are you? What do you want?” Castiel said. Human language always felt strange on his tongue.

“I’m Dean Winchester,” the man said. “I’m here to kill you, Cas.”

“How do you know my name?” Castiel narrowed his eyes. It was never good when a human got hold of his name. Names had power.

“Got it from a half-fish in the next town over,” Dean said.

It was either Uriel or Balthazar, and Balthazar always liked Castiel better than Uriel did. “Do you mean Uriel?”

“Was he a big black guy? Yeah, he wasn’t real big on confidentiality. He told me all about you once I started kicking him around a bit,” Dean said. “Said you hunted on this beach.”

Castiel growled. “He’s a traitor.”

“Don’t worry. I ganked him for you,” Dean said. He tapped a finger on the trident pressed against Castiel’s chest. “Had to try this out. I wasn’t so sure it’d work.”

“Of course it’d work,” Castiel said. He could smell the blood and magic on the prongs. “Where did you get that?”

“Got it from a thrift shop. They didn’t know what it was. They thought it was just some trash someone left on the beach,” Dean said. “Now I’m gonna use it on you for what you did to Sam.”

“Who?” Castiel said.

Dean’s eyes darkened. “Don’t you dare tell me you don’t remember him. How many people have you killed in the last three days?”

Only one human. A hunter that had used a conch shell to summon him to the shore, to try to kill him. A hunter like Dean.

“I didn’t realize the remains would be washed up on shore so soon.”

“Yeah. Unluckily for you, I knew where to look before sharks got to him,” Dean said bitterly.

“He tried to kill me.” Castiel said.

“There were human teeth marks on his bones,” Dean said. “You ate my brother, you sick fuck.”

“He didn’t survive our fight. Would you rather I kill another human for food?”

Dean threw back his head and started to laugh. His laughter was loud and long and mirthless.

“What is so funny?” Castiel said.

“It sounded so much better when you put it like that, Cas,” Dean said with a humorless grin. “You know how I know there is no God? God wouldn’t make a monster like you so pretty. Makes it so easy for people to trust you. I bet they are drawn to you like moths to fire.”

“I could say the same about you,” Castiel said. After all, Dean was the reason why Castiel had a trident pressed against his chest now.

Dean glowered at him. “I’m nothing like you.”

Castiel didn’t argue. Humans were often self-righteous creatures. “I’m not sorry about what I did.”

“I don’t expect you to be sorry,” Dean said, pressing the trident down into Castiel’s chest. The trident began to cut into his skin. “But you should know something: Karma is a bitch.”

Castiel kept his eyes trained on Dean. He didn’t let his gaze trailed to the figure looming out of the waves behind Dean. “It is.”

A dull thud sounded in the quiet of the night. Dean slumped forwards. Castiel caught him before he hit the sand.

Balthazar smirked, holding a rock coated in blood and bits of skin and hair. Wet sand stuck to the scales of his tail. “Oh, Cassy, two hunters in one week? You’re too popular for your own good.”

“Thank you for saving me, Balthazar,” Castiel said.

Balthazar threw the stone into the sea. It skipped across the water several times before sinking. “What are you going to do with the human?”

Castiel didn’t answer. He picked up the trident from Dean’s hand, and opened a vein in his arm. He dripped drops of his blood into Dean’s mouth before the wound healed.

“What are you doing?”

“Blood magic. I’m taking him with me,” Castiel said, watching the blood mixed with the saliva in Dean’s mouth. It would be enough for Dean to absorb the blood into his body.

“He tried to kill you.”

“I remember,” Castiel said sourly.

Balthazar looked more serious than Castiel had ever seen him, and they had known each other for a long time. “You can take him into the sea for a few days, Cas, but you can’t keep him forever. He’ll try to return to the land, probably after he kills you for good.”

Castiel took another look at Dean, at his thick eyelashes and tanned skin. Dean was really an attractive human. Once he was stripped of his trident, he would pose no harm to Castiel.

“There is only one way you can keep the human. We both know that,” Balthazar said.

Castiel had spent a long time swimming in the seas, in the wide expanses of water. There were more sea than land, but there were very few merpeople. If Castiel left the coastlines, where his brethren hunted, and made his way across the seas, he could swim for months without seeing another merperson.

Life was lonely and quiet under the sea, but it didn’t have to stay like that forever.

“I’ll do the ritual,” Castiel said.

“Are you sure?”

“No one will miss him. He works alone, and his brother is dead,” Castiel said.

“You can’t come back from something like that, Cas.”

Humans told stories of humans stealing seal skins to keep beautiful selkies on land and take them as their wives. It was strangely similar to what merpeople did to the humans that they’d fallen in love with, to keep the humans from returning to the land, to severe the humans’ connections to the land.

Castiel knew it was what his mother had done, what his grandfather had done, what many had done before him.

There were not many merpeople in the seas.

It was so easy to fall in love with a human instead.

“I’ll do the ritual,” Castiel repeated. “I’ll cut off his legs and feed them to the sharks. He’ll stay.”


End file.
